


The Black Humor Market

by Morbane



Category: This Is the Happiness and Peace of Mind Committee - Shiroko Diamond Sparkle (Song)
Genre: Constructive Criticism Welcome, Counterculture, Dystopia, Execution, Gen, Slice of Life, Utopia, color symbolism
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-06-03
Updated: 2015-06-03
Packaged: 2018-04-02 16:17:22
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,745
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4066471
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Morbane/pseuds/Morbane
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>happiness, power, responsibility</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Black Humor Market

**Author's Note:**

  * For [VampirePaladin](https://archiveofourown.org/users/VampirePaladin/gifts).



When Cilla woke up, the walls of her pod were dark purplish-blue, shot through with anger and sadness, green and brown.

Cilla closed her eyes again. She didn't remember anything about her dreams except for the troubled feelings that were with her now, beating on her walls with clashing colours. It would be all right. Dreams were not under anyone's control, and the mood monitor would register that she had just woken up. It would give her a grace period to regain her calm or ask for help.

She opened her eyes and breathed slowly, looking at the walls.

The streaks of green were ugly, but there was something appealing about the contrast of blue and brown. She looked at that, watching as the brown patches shrank and disappeared, like a puddle drying in the sun. She stared at the walls until they resolved into a warm blue glow. Some green still flickered across the walls in thin, zig-zagging lines, but it was like distant lightning. Dangerous, but not to her, not right now. She thought about who she was and what she would do that day.

"I am Cilla," she said calmly and steadily. I am happy." She wriggled her toes under the sheets. She was warm, though her mouth was dry, and her left arm, pinned under her, was a little stiff. That was all right. She had five minutes left of the time she'd allowed herself for emotional stability. It was nice to have a few minutes free in the morning.

When her bad dreams had become a regular occurrence, a few months ago, the mood consultant had suggested setting her alarm ten minutes early. If her mood was in a dangerous range when she awoke, she could take time to calm down without affecting the rest of her routine. Cilla had been disturbed by the idea that her bad dreams would not go away on their own. It bothered her that she would have to change her lifestyle to manage this. But the mood consultant had been reassuring.

"Happiness is your job," he had said, smiling in a way that suggested some additional meaning to the familiar mantra. "And a job requires work!"

Cilla had nodded.

"Cilla, you already have many tools and strategies for increasing your own happiness,” the mood consultant had encouraged her. “Think of this one as just one more that you can learn to use effectively."

In a mood consultant’s office, the mood transmitters were turned off. There were no displays. Her jewellery and his faded to a dull off-white. It was a neutral time. Feelings of joy would not count towards your monthly score, but at the same time, neither would it hurt your score if you used the time with a mood consultant to explore pain and distress. Because of this, Cilla could not tell if the mood consultant felt as positive about her progress as he was acting. 

So listen to his words, she told herself. Use what you are given. She had nodded again. She had thought about how clear and firm mood consultants had to be, when talking to their clients, to adjust for a social setting that they were familiar with and that their clients were not.

"Is that what you’re thinking about, Cilla?" the mood consultant asked, smiling with good humour, after she had been silent for a few seconds.

"I was thinking about the work you do," she answered. "I was thinking about what it means not to know how someone is feeling."

The mood consultant said, "I infer how you are feeling from your records, and past reports, and from what you tell me about how you are feeling. I can’t be completely sure. But that’s okay, because I check often, and because I’m used to not being sure. This is a line of work that requires me to be able to handle a lot of uncertainty. In turn, I help other people handle uncertainty."

Cilla nodded again, fascinated.

"What about you, Cilla? Do you enjoy your work?"

"Yes," Cilla had been able to say. "I do."

Cilla worked at the water purification plant. Her shift started later than that of many other people who podded on her floor and the floor above. Sometimes, when she was in a social mood, she took advantage of this to sit in the dining hall for a full hour before work, moving towards and greeting many of the other residents she knew. At other times, she waited until most people had eaten and left - because she could - and chose from the leftovers in enjoyable quiet.

Today she walked in with the early rush, spoke to her podfellow Benni, ate her breakfast, and travelled quickly to her workplace.

The shift manager was surprised to see her. "Don’t worry," said Cilla. "I just wanted to check some of the forms I’ve filed." There was a meeting later in the day. 

Cilla checked her forms, slowly, carefully, pressing worry down under her slow breaths. Then she set to ordinary tasks.

Cilla’s work involved cleaning mechanical parts, putting them through tests, cleaning up after the tests, and filing paperwork about the tests.

"Yes," she said in the meeting. "The main engine is performing well within specs. However, our operational guidelines say we should order a new engine after five years has passed. That means we order a new engine."

The supervisor wanted to delay ordering a new engine (the current engine would not fail, not this quarter, if Cilla read the signs right) and write it up in his own report as superlative team performance keeping the old engine operational. That was true. Cilla fought it. "Getting a new engine this year has been budgeted for," she asked, "right?" It ought to have been. If it hadn’t been, there were all kinds of tricks to allow them to enter the operational requirement request after the fact. But Cilla was not (yet) moved to help the supervisor out.

"We can order a new engine now," she said persuasively, "keep the old engine running, schedule in some drills for switching out the engines, and still look excellent in our performance reports when we start the new engine running long after the fact, with no delivery losses."

"There’s some paperwork," the supervisor said ponderously.

Cilla smiled at him, trying not to let the prospect of victory brighten her jewellery too much. Her bracelets crept towards a warm orange. “I can anticipate the paperwork.” Cilla had twenty relevant forms fanned out on the table in front of her, just for show.

She liked the idea of having replacements to hand before the things they were meant to be replacing caused any problems.

She didn’t like the idea that her work and her team’s work in caring for the mechanical components at the water refinement plant would turn into a commendation for the supervisor, and an exaggerated expectation for the life expectancy of components, and a catastrophic failure years into the future when extending the lifespan of components was rewarded and rewarded and rewarded.

But she had spoken her piece, as effectively as she knew, and the decision would come later.

After production work, she had social work. In Pursuit, working to enhance connections within the community, and other people's sense of security and wellbeing, was considered as important as food, sanitation, and similar basic needs. Everyone had some kind of allotted social work to perform at various points during the week.

After Cilla's last appointment with the mood consultant, he had consulted her. “I think you could help provide a guiding influence,” he had said. “If you’re amenable, I will set you up with someone.” She had agreed. It was hardly the worst kind of evening social work; she could still break off the connection, if the recommended person's personality was a poor fit with her own. He had forwarded a profie.The profile showed a woman, Ondra, six years younger, a refuse worker aiming towards communications.

“Guiding: what do you mean?” she had emailed cautiously.

“I think you could offer perspective from other sectors.”

That wasn’t very helpful (she had not worked in either communications or refuse), but she had gradually gleaned his intent: stability. Forward thinking. She was to demonstrate what the consultant had called her tools and strategies.

This was her second meeting. Ondra seemed very young. There was a trauma that Cilla was hesitant to enquire about, though Ondra seemed inclined to tell her about it: Ondra's birth mother had tried to become her mother in all traditional senses, and when thwarted in this by the creche mothers and Pursuit society, she had left Pursuit for another life.

Cilla did not know how to help with any of these wounds. She had decided she would escort Ondra to the Black Humor Market.

They met in a café after Ondra’s shift, physical labor in the westernmost sector, an easy half-hour walk after Cilla had finished her work in Central-East.

Ondra was reading a screen with her chin in her hands. Her eyes were very wide. Cilla ordered them coffee. “Let’s not stay long,” she said.

“Oh?” Ondra said, her eyes even wider, flirtatious.

“I have something I need to get at the black market,” Cilla said casually.

She didn’t, really. There was something building up in her dreams, some anger or weirdness or confusion it might be nice to scream out, but no _requirements_. Instead, she thought it was a good idea to escort Ondra there, to show her what attitude to take to it (not too great a sense of rebellion, nor fear; visits were permitted as long as they didn't bleed over into your life when under monitor.). This young worker seemed inclined to overreact. Her first interview had shown moods all over the spectrum. She didn’t even seem to care who knew that she felt vicious or vulnerable. Cilla, therefore, planned to lead her to a place where she could bargain in either of those modes.

No; bargaining, right now, might be beyond her. But it was a possible start.

The Market was situated in a zone where the mood monitors went haywire. Cilla had never been sure if that was a quirk or by design. At the Market, no one measured whether you were happy or sad. Your credit transfers showed up days after the fact, when you could alter them discriminately. Your transfers might show clothing or hygiene goods, or materials for a creative project, or other productive purchases - when what you had paid for might have been pain, or discordant music, or blank minutes of some kind that no one but you would question.

Cilla would teach Ondra the basics of editing those purchase records in a few days, but for now, she only wanted to impress on Ondra the freedom of it, the sense of permission, the range of what was on offer.

“We’ll meet back in an hour,” she said, squeezing Ondra’s hand. “Don’t do anything you don’t want to do.”

Ondra’s mouth had been completing the phrase as “that I wouldn’t do,” and, hearing the phrase as Cilla spoke it, her own voice died away.

“Understood?” Cilla asked.

“Yeah,” Ondra said.

Cilla squeezed Ondra’s hand again, and watched as she vanished.

There were people crying here. There was the sound of films playing beyond tent flaps in which voices purred and screamed and snarled. You could buy anything here - well, supposedly anything.

Cilla had never made particularly unusual purchases. 

She usually came here to walk - to take in others’ blatant discomfort and turn it into something she could accept. Especially when she was worried about the machinery at the processing plant, or the expressions of those she saw on her podding floor, or what she could glean from the news about those she had shared a creche with.

She had come here during the last period when she had been reassigned, from creche-workers’-assistant to water-purification engineer, with the requisite training piled on top. She had come here because it afforded her a sense of continuity otherwise lacking. Noth that she would ever admit that out loud.

She didn’t need a tattoo artist or fortune teller, a torturer or a meat-provider. She walked. It wasn’t a very long square. In the south corner, the sounds that emerged were suggestively sexual, but Cilla avoided them. The stall in front of that corner had all kinds of drugs, from legitimate painkillers to highly illegal highs. Cilla walked past it, and turned.

Where no one had been placed before, a Knight was kneeling.

She was unmistakeable. She was wearing a tunic stamped with all kinds of symbols of water and weapons - a mill, a shield, a river, a bow. She had her hands pressed together in front of her, but instead of eyes closed in prayer, her expression was alert.

She did not move as Cilla moved in front of her; only her eyes took Cilla in, and then ranged beyond her.

This, Cilla calculated slowly, must be a Vigil, the ritual that Knights of Ondine undertook before they ascended to the upper rank of those who served Ondine. To absorb humanity’s sorrow and wrath before vowing to defeat it.

As such, the Knight’s presence here was unofficial. Since she was not yet a Knight - and Cilla checked again, anxiously, for official marks on her uniform - she could not accuse or arrest. She was only here to absorb the setting.

Much as Cilla was.

Cilla distrusted her.

She stared at the Knight in clear challenge, wondering if the Knight would meet her gaze and if she could win the starting contest, if so. The Knight looked through her, turning Cilla's suspicious gaze into a kind of witnessing.

Many minutes later, Ondra spoke at her side. "Cilla, isn’t it getting late?"

“You’re right, it is,” Cilla said. “Let’s return.” She felt stupid and vulnerable and antagonised. She felt angry. She felt scared. She had to buy a high at a booth before walking back into mood-monitored areas. "That Knight bothered me," she explained to Ondra. She didn't want Ondra to think she bought highs very often.

Perhaps, for her instructive outing with Ondra, she should have taken her to a rave instead. Ondine herself, the queen of happiness, had been rumoured to show up on the stage very frequently. But no one seemed to know, before the time, whether or not she would appear.

Cilla had strong memories of her last rave. _Are you happy? Yes! Yes! We are so happy!_ / _That's scary!_ / _That's amazing!_ She had joined in the singing, and the howling out. She had answered Ondine’s chants. She had woken up in the morning angry and miserable and confused, glad there was no other rave to follow that evening. Some people reacted to heightened emotions with a slump, her mood consultant had told her.

No; it was more satisfying for her to walk around her blocks in a foggy mood.

When she returned to her pod, it lit up with cream and gray and blue for her, scrolling news across the screen.

_Knight: executed. Details to follow._

Now Cilla felt weightless. That was the punishment for those who served Ondine and failed. It shoudn’t feel personal to Cilla, but it did: she thought of the Knight at the Market soaking up anger and pettiness, in the garden, in preparation for everything to come.

She did not know what might come, in the life of a Knight.

It was only early evening. Cilla had a sense of potential: that things might change if she chose for them to change. She performed quick research, finding out locations and protocols. She stepped out of her pod tower with the stars blinking into the sky.

“This is the funeral for Ondine’s Knight,” the gatekeeper said suspiciously, looking at her pass.

“Yes,” Cilla said.

There was nothing to scan or challenge, for Cilla knew this to be correct. She obeyed Ondine, and her Knights, and all of their achievements, even if they should later fall. She honoured everything the Knights stood for, even their execution, unless that was to be wrapped away - and even so, someone should witness it.

She stood calm under the gatekeepers’ gaze, and joined the lines of those who had gathered to pay tribute to one who had once been a knight of Ondine.

“I am happy,” Cilla said quietly to herself, and her rings and bracelets said the same.


End file.
